LincolnBlogs

Ahh, it’s been far too long since I have had anything to say here. I have to say that I have been *legitimately* busy this time. As many of you know, we have come to a close on the first season of The LinuxLink TechShow. That’s 365 (about) 2 hour long episodes over the course of the last 6 years. We are due to start our next 365 at the Ohio Linux Fest in a month. This leaves an enormous amount of prep work and a fair bit of reorganization to keep things exciting and help us start out with a bang.

One of the *surprises* in store brings me to my current topic at hand, my web workers toolkit.

People all have differing opinions about what you really need to do decent web work. As an old commandline jockey, I thought I would share my own.

1) Vim.
Quite possibly the best text editor in the world, I use vim for darn near everything. As a system administrator, it’s indispensable (for scripting) and I find it similarly necessary for web work. Vim has a fantastic (imho) syntax highlighting system which does quite well for html and php highlighting. The only caveat is to make sure to set “set background=dark” in your .vimrc file, unless, of course, you are one of those wierdos who uses a light background in your terminal.

2) tidy or the w3c validator.
I DEFY you to write good code without one of these. There is NOTHING as nice as standards compliant code and without a good validator, you will have nothing like standards compliant code. The reason I listed both of these is that tidy is a program you can use locally to check your code and the w3c validator will check any pages that are accessible via the web.

3) Many different browsers.
Unfortunately, all browsers are not made equal. You can be sure that all mozilla based browsers like Firefox, etc., will display things very similarly, and maybe even throw Google Chrome into that mix, but you may really want to check your code with Safari and IE to be sure things still look the way you had intended, and let’s not forget about a text browser like lynx or w3m to make sure your pages are readable and navigable that way too.

4) Lastly, for me, some good reference material.
One can hardly be expected to remember everything and having some reference material handy for those odd css commands and perhaps php/perl/python/someotherprogramminglanguage could really save you some time and frustration. Never underestimate keeping your old code around for example and never ever underestimate the power of the power of the Google Search!

In a nutshell, that’s generally what keeps me cranking out websites and webpages. What kinds of things do you use? What am I missing out on? Send a long a comment and let us all know what works for you! ( Unless, of course, you use emacs 😀 )